Speaking at a town hall meeting, Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) suggested President Obama was only elected president because he's an African-American.

Said Walsh: "He's our first African-American president. The country voted for him because of that. It made us feel good about ourself. I've said it before, it helped that John McCain was about 142 years old. It helped that the economy was tanking. A lot of these things helped. But he never would have gotten there without his historic nature."

And if Bush's name were George W. Robbins, he wouldn't have beaten McCain and Forbes.

Depends, if he were somehow Governor of Texas anyway he probably would've done just as well if not better. If Obama's biography were exactly the same except for being (or even appearing) white, there's absolutely no scenario in which he'd be able to beat Clinton for the nomination.

I didn't pick Obama cause he was black, I picked him cause he was a fresh and energizing face. There's nothing to show Obama beat Hillary simply cause he was black. Maybe some people didn't want to have (at least) 24 years of a Bush-Clinton dynasty.

I didn't pick Obama cause he was black, I picked him cause he was a fresh and energizing face. There's nothing to show Obama beat Hillary simply cause he was black. Maybe some people didn't want to have (at least) 24 years of a Bush-Clinton dynasty.

Obama was picked because he was a new face and that included being black, being black in itself didn't only elect him. However skin tone did make a different he had the Doug Wilder effect, whereas Roland Burris and Jesse L Jackson Jr, themselves who were vying for upward mobility Roland for Gov in 1999 and Jesse Jackson Jr for Prez someday did have something to do with it.

I frankly care more about his offensive comment towards John McCain- he had also used offensive language about him in the past. This and that- along with his diminishing Duckworth's service- earn Walsh ZERO respect from me...

Joe Walsh believes that if Jesse Jackson had been nominated in 1984, he would have defeated Reagan in a landslide. OK.

It's of course silly to claim that being black gives a politician an insurmountable advantage. But I'm pretty sure Walsh wasn't claiming that. Indeed, it can be the case that blackness is a disadvantage a large majority of the time, but that Obama was one of the few cases in which it was an advantage. I doubt it made much of a net difference in the general, but I'm pretty sure it was a deciding factor in the primary, where winning as the underdog requires you to differentiate yourself from the crowd of other compotent politicians.

Yeah, after four years of being a non-disruptive poster on the forum, never considered a troublemaker, even someone who was liked well enough to be elected Atlasian President, Napoleon should be allowed to stay.

It's debatable whether Obama gained anything from being black against McCain (I'd lean towards it essentially having no effect, with racism and energized black voters canceling out) and it's probably true he would have won anyway.

However, I think it is extremely clear that he would not have been the nominee had he been white. It's hard to forget that Bill Clinton used to be called the first black president. Clinton would probably have won the majority of the black vote against "white Obama" as well as still getting most of the rural whites. I don't really see a credible coalition for Obama to stop Hillary with without him having the black vote.

Have you not heard of the legend of the player who once burnt down King's Landing along with most of Houses Tyrell and Lannister? Have you not heard of the menace who led the White Walkers into invading the North and committing genocide in Westeros? Or the man whose actions planted the seeds for the Revolution in Poland-Lithuania? And the man who dared to burn Rome, Avignon and Jerusalem?